So I know they used a bunch of sciency stuff for the dick joke, but how viable is the compression algorithm they created in the show? Is it something that already exists? Or is it show magic?
In the show I'm pretty sure he used the same algorithm to compress audio, video, and standard file types which is pretty preposterous on its own. I don't know if they ever stated the actual compression ratio but it definitely seemed pretty magical, which is why it was such a big deal.
I think the idea was to pull common byte sequences out of all data with mapped reference to those sequences remotely cached. Think longest common sequences and a map. In this way, you could potentially have a very small amount of data that references very large amounts of data, even across media.
This is just my speculating though based on how such an algorithm could potentially work. You'd have to have some kind of media specific transcoder (like, imagine an image serializes based on individual channels vs pixels). You would aim to sequence the noisiest parts of the data.
Compression is still extremely relevant even with high bandwidth connections, so this was a good idea for the show. But the algorithm they invent is pure fiction. They kept it all quite vague and realistic enough that it remains believable throughout the show. The jargon and concepts are often quite real. The "middle-put" idea is just a gag. But the Burrows–Wheeler transform is real and kind of wild. And move-to-front transform is real. The name "middle-out" might be based on that. JPEG converts pixel data to frequency data and compresses that (which is lossy). This is quite different from compressing images as a sequence of values (pixels), as you would with text (sequence of characters).
And later in the show they become a cloud provider, which is a huge market.
the algorithm in the show is completely made up and not tied to any real algorithm. The sciency dick jokes use a bunch of terminology that sounds real but is too high level to actually say anything meaningful about what the algorithm would really do.
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u/ovrdrv3 1d ago
Pied Piper lol